Just to be longlisted is a great honor!

Thank you to all the people at Harper Collins who worked so hard to publicize this book, starting with Lead Read, all the rich and subtle visuals put together by the art department. My editor Jennifer Brehl was tireless in promoting it, and so here we are on the long list! And so onward!

Well done! The Harper Collins art department has made some great choices in terms of tones, color combinations, spacing etc. with all of the assets around launching this book.

Picking on the Porch photos by Hattie Barham.  Been trying to deal with Facebook but it is so frustrating.

Chuck Crane, mandolin player and fearless leader.

So many people tell me they can’t sing but  one can learn to play an instrument and music is joy. Producing music is joy. Being a listener, that’s fun too but making it is far more, well, joyful.

A recent discussion brought this book to mind. It has been over ten years since I read it, I think, but it is one of those unknown classics.

Not a good cover since it is a memoir of urban life, NYC, at the turn of the last century, written with passion, loving remembrances, the frustrations and furies of growing up the son of recent immigrants in particular and the questions children always have in general. It is replete with images of a vanished world. These children were not saturated with images, propaganda, advertising, hectoring and canned music at every turn. A street life, a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else and got into everybody else’s business for good or for ill. Roth’s biography was written by Steve Kellman, titled Redemption, and it  is also good.

In the new dystopian series I am in some way trying to create a vital street life as portrayed in Call It Sleep.  (What an awful title). Most dystopian narratives portray a beaten, dull populace crushed by the presence of The Authorities but I felt it would be far more true to life to find the liveliness in the urban dystopia. In The Fifth Circle there is a young guy in the prison who had managed to evade the Soviet authorities for two years, without an ID, or residence permit, internal passport etc. and was determined to escape and do it again. Street life is so ad hoc. Inventive.

Roth runs into the problem of dialect — how to portray it, what orthography? He tries to recreate it in spelling, which is a solution that has its own problems but it works. It sounds to me very New York but then I am no expert on New York speech.

     Sophe-e! Above him the cry. Sophe-e!

     Ye-es mama-a! from a girl across the street.

     Comm opstehs! Balt!

     Awaa! 

     Balt or I’ll give you! Nooo!

     With a rebellious shudder the girl began crossing the street. The window slammed down. Pushing a milk-stained rancid baby carriage before them, squat buttocks waddled past, one arm from somewhere dragging two reeling children, each hooked by its hand to the other, each bouncing against the other and against their mother like tops, flagging and whipped. (Me; tops are spun by whipping with a cord) A boy ran in front of the carriage. It rammed him.

     Ow! Kentcha see wea yuh goin? He rubbed his ankle. …

     Ahead of him, flying toward the shore beyond the East River, shaggy clouds trooped after their van. And across the river the white smoke of nearer stacks was flattened out and stormy as though the stacks were the funnels of a flying ship. …At the doorway to the cheder corridor he stopped and cast one lingering glace up and down the street…He’d better go in before the rest of the Rabbi’s pupils came. He turned and trudged through the dim battered corridor. The yard was gloomy. Wash-poles creaked and swayed, pullleys jangled. In a window overhjead a bulky bare-armed woman shrilled curses at someone behind her and hastily hauled in the bedding that straddled the sills like bulging sacks.

     And your guts be plucked! Her words rang out over the yard. Couldn’t you tell me it was raining? 

This is Labor Day weekend, a long weekend and so the people who fly the hang-gliders are flying over my ridge. I have tried repeatedly to get good pictures of them but have not succeeded. This has been the rainiest August on record, a friend tells me. Photographer here day before yesterday to take photo and I probably looked terrible but then one always thinks that.

I will get the schedule up as soon as possible. Looks like I will have to be gone from home for two weeks! Auriel will take care of Gradycat, I am hoping to leave Buck and El Donko in Evelyn and Pat’s pasture down on the Seventy and Girl Dog? Haven’t figured that out yet. It all begins the first of October; first to Asheville NC, then Houston, the Minneapolis, then St. Louis. From St. Louis down to PB with Susan and Mark and then Susan and I will get our Ozark Trail ride in, a little early. Then home.

Of course you want to know what this is. Okay. The roundish object is one of the moons of Saturn, named Daphnis. Daphnis is about five miles in diameter. In the rings of Saturn, there is a gap of clear space. It is called the Keeler Gap.  This is a computer simulation of Daphnis sailing along in the Keeler Gap. You are richer for this, you know. Your mind has been expanded. Woooooooo.

Picture or photo by Kevin Gill/Flicker.

Looking forward to an e-conversation with Tracy Chevalier, an interview with an editor at Kirkus, opening the launch in Houston October 4th, a reading in Asheville NC, introduced by Charles Frazier (really looking forward to that), then Minneapolis, then from there fly to St. Louis the 13th for Left Bank books, then 4 days riding with Susan in the Ozarks, then home. It’s going to be a pressed, busy trip but I think I will be okay.

The video is up at newsoftheworldbook.com. I love it.

Haven’t been riding for a month except one day a week ago, when it was so hot, got on for 15 minutes but both Buck and I thought, ‘this sucks’ and turned around. Then all of a sudden, I think it was, August 11th, Thursday, after it had been 102 F. for a week, the rains came. The temperature dropped to the eighties, so far have had five inches or so. I am working down in the pasture when I can, clearing an area, it’s like landscaping or interior decorating. Exterior decorating. I am making a good place for the equines under two very large, old cedars.

The music group is going to have to do without Chuck for September. Working on my piano scales. Started a new work about a quartet in the post-apocalypse. What good is singing when the world is collapsing? Answer; a great deal.

The thing about inventing a world for sci-fi or dystopia is that the writer loses all that wealth and complexity of dialect and jokes and songs and references and slang that makes up much of our daily life. And you can’t invent that without it sounding false, so you must do without it, and your dystopian world is fall less rich in language and reference than that of a historical novel. Unless you have characters that incessantly refer back to the ‘old world’ — i.e. ‘this ancient song, called I Ain’t Got No Satisfaction’ etc. but that gets heavy and forced after a while.

Lovely, lovely rain.

It’s at newsoftheworldbook.com. What a time we had making that video! The truck died, Dolly became terminally ill, I was at my wit’s end, but all went well. Especially with Ev O’Hara’s help. I think it’s interesting, it has horses, running river, green trees, and so on. Not so much pontificating from me, but when people turn a camera on you and ask for your words of wisdom it is really tempting to blather away and get onto your favorite themes and inform the world of things the world ought to know. Temptation must be rigorously banged on the head.

So it looks good, the website looks good, and I am very happy with it all. Great quote from Charles Frazier.

And here we are — the POP band!

Much activity down at the park in the middle of town — a new rock wall and these lovely cutout sculptures are being put up. My guess is that the wide rock wall will become a sitting-place. The park is too open to be comfortable in the summer heat, but the wall will be entirely in shade. The only shade is the gazebo visible behind the central deer but, as I said, the rock wall will be shady.

The big cypress is the one that is lit up for Christmas.

This is my favorite. It’s on top of the rock wall at the south end. A scrub jay and quail and metal cutout sculpture of a fencepost and probably real barbed wire.  The building on the far side of the park is the volunteer fire department/EMS ready room, where they have their radios, classes, computers, some bunks I think for those on duty.

Buck is in the backyard this morning, mowing the grass. Nice to have him up here at the house with me. My air conditioner in the study died, and without it, it gets to be about 120 F up here. I bought a new one, but getting the dead one out of the wall up here in the second story was daunting and I had no idea how to go about it. It was a big 16,000 BTU monster. It was flush with the wall inside and stuck out of the exterior wall about two feet.

Thought of just shoving it right on out of the wall and into the yard below. Called Mr. Brundage and he came with his son and he looked at it, then removed the guts, or the interior works, out of the housing, the frame, carried up my new one, and just inserted it into the old housing/frame. Problem solved. Duh.

My bank account got hacked. It has all been very interesting. The bank will recover almost all of it but tracing down the names and entities behind the unaccredited withdrawals has been fascinating. I don’t think the bank expected me to go to much trouble but I was simply interested. One name, FlagshipCA, led to Western Union, who had no way of finding or tracing it. Another led to a rental property management software company in Salt Lake City Utah, Entrata, and a Utah bank, another to a really trashy apartment complex in San Antonio, Iron Horse Valley Rentals, so most of it seemed to have to do with rentals. They were withdrawing rent money, plus utility money on the San Antonio city electric company.

How did they get my bank account number? I guess through my debit card? I am so ignorant about this, which is why I find it intriguing. Well, off to the bank now to fill out the forms. My little bank here in West Texas is so great, love them.

A great photo by Jeff George, it’s on Woody and Jeff’s calendar they send out to friends every year of scenes from the lighthouse.  I need to put up the one from June, it’s of two bright red helicopters landing on their landing pad, I believe from the Canadian Coast Guard.

Back from St. Louis. Since I don’t watch TV I head about the killing of the Dallas policemen while standing in line at the airport to come home. People told me in a sort of dull, subdued way as if to say ‘What next?’ It all seems to be media-driven. The protesters are there for the camera, and the killer was on the black Panther social media sites all the time, posted pictures of himself being cool and defiant.  A group of young women Black Panthers marching with their fists in the air were dressed just like Beyonce’s dancers. They expected to get their picture taken and be on a front page or three-second shot somewhere they were not wrong. However, the media does not offer a paycheck to its watchers or change the weather or control the economy, and yet many people’s minds simply live in it as if it were a real world.

The trip to St. Louis was very good, met with bookstore owners and Robin Smith of Harper Collins and was interviewed by the Post-Dispatch.

Friend Laurel Water’s treehouse is going to be on a television program July 15th, on Treehouse Masters. It is beautiful.

Missed April Baxter’s birthday party, I got home about 4 but was too tired and frazzled to go. Now I have a new dog, whom I call Girl Dog, and Grady Cat not taking it at all well but have managed to keep them separated. The bluegrass group is getting together next Wednesday, even though we are off for the summer we’re getting together to play and sing and for the companionship.

Reading Jack Vance and find a deep interest in his change and growth from the ‘Forties and Fifties to works like The Dying Earth and Madouc when he finally hit his stride.